Why Public Sector organizations favor Fujitsu SPARC servers

Fujitsu SPARC M12 and M10 servers have become the systems of choice for a wide variety of organizations in almost every industry segment. We’ve noticed that these systems particularly appeal to customers in the public sector – like educational institutions, governmental organizations, and even research laboratories.

In looking back at these sales, several common factors seemed to come up again and again. Let’s take a closer look…

World Bank Cites Higher Performance

High performance was cited by many of our public sector customers as a major reason for selecting a Fujitsu SPARC system. For example, the World Bank did a series of internal benchmarks using their own applications. They found that the Fujitsu M10 delivered twice the performance of their current SPARC Enterprise M4000 systems and significantly higher throughput than the other system they were evaluating. The Fujitsu M10 demonstrated excellent, balanced performance on both floating point and integer operations, making it a perfect fit for their diverse workloads.

While the Fujitsu M10 offers excellent performance, it has been eclipsed by the Fujitsu SPARC M12, which offers approximately 2.5x higher performance than the M10.

Defense Lab Appreciates Pay as You Grow

Other customers, including a defense research facility, said that the ability to add additional capacity core-by-core was a chief reason they went with the Fujitsu M10/M12. This allows them to start out with a small machine and grow it over time by activating cores as they need them. Nearly all other vendors force the customer to pay for and activate all the cores that are present in the machine when the machine is delivered – not so with Fujitsu SPARC servers.

Reliability Key for Educational Institutions

When it comes to mission critical workloads, system uptime is key. The Fujitsu M10 and M12 systems have advanced hardware RAS features that, when coupled with Solaris – one of the most reliable operating systems in the world – make the system extremely reliable and resilient.

Ronnie Bryant, Chief Information Office at Brunswick Community College commented:

“We’ve had no support issues whatsoever with the Fujitsu M10 servers. In fact, they’ve only been down one time, and that’s because we lost power to the building – I’d call that 99.99% reliability.”

Dustin Howell, Systems Administrator at Mitchell Community College put it this way:

“The Fujitsu M10-1 is a workhorse server, and its increase in speed over our previous solution is a big plus. In addition, the servers employ high-availability principles at all levels, from the processor chip to the system design, which helps deliver 24/7 uptime for critical campus applications.”

Preserve Existing Environment

Many of our public sector customers need the ability to natively run older versions of Solaris. The risk involved with porting existing mission critical applications to new operating systems is too high, in their estimation, to justify the potential benefits. Because these customers don’t need any additional business value with the current system refresh – what they want is keep the current software environment as long as they can. Porting applications, then retuning them, can also carry a high cost in terms of labor and lost productivity.

The Fujitsu M10 and Fujitsu SPARC M12 systems give customers more operating system choices than any other SPARC-based system. Both of the Fujitsu servers can run the newest Solaris operating systems and can also run Solaris 10 natively and earlier versions in Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers. This gives customers the ability to run older applications on new hardware as long as they want with minimum cost and thus take advantage of the much higher performance on the new systems

This important feature also gives customers the ability to migrate to new hardware and then subsequently migrate to a newer version of Solaris. This makes it much easier to identify errors, eliminating the question “Is it the hardware or the software that’s causing the problem?”

When you consider the above factors, it’s easy to see why the Fujitsu brand of SPARC servers is a top choice for public sector accounts. High performance, capacity on demand, high reliability, and the ability to select the best operating system for the job at hand are key considerations for public organizations that are trying to acquire the best technology with tax payer funds.